Katalyst: Space Invadas.

Katalyst plays Ric’ on Saturday.

Ashley Anderson is a busy man. He records and releases fine down-beat hip-hop under the name Katalyst, as well as running the fledgling record label Invada Records with production engineer Fraser Stuart and Portishead’s Geoff Barrow. The label had it’s first release with the debut Katalyst album Manipulating Agent, and quickly found success with the Australian mainstream.

It’s a beautiful work of music, rising above many hip-hop albums to become something as widely acceptable and gentle as Massive Attack or Portishead. Triple J had the foresight to put Manipulating Agent straight onto high rotation as well as giving it Album of the Week status, which exposed it to a much wider audience than Ashley had imagined, as he explains later in the article.

Katalyst just supported Blackalicious in Sydney last Thursday, as well as an all weekend stint at Splendour In The Grass over the weekend. So just how does Katalyst kick it live?

“The live thing is primarily DJ based. Myself and Leeroy Brown (my DJ on the record) are the two behind the decks. We’ve got four turntables and a couple of CD players, some effects and an MC or two for a few tunes. It’s more of a club party set, and a combination of my tunes and other white labels that I’ve gotten from fellow producers. Most of the tracks we drop haven’t been released, as well as some of my unreleased material that’ll be coming out in future. And of course their’s some classics to spark the crowd up and get them all dancing. There is lots of live scratching, and we use the four decks to only play a small part of each track, and to remix them live and keep it all moving along.”

Manipulating Agent is your first release. How’s do you feel it’s doing with people?

“The album has been doing really well. It was really good to get so much support from Triple J, and I think the individual presenters and DJ’s have all been behind the record as well, playing heaps of the music. Apart from that the reviews have all been very good, and all the responses from people are great. I’m a little surprised at the breadth of the albums attraction. It’s a lot wider than what I’d envisioned, but that’s only really a positive thing.”

I’ve played this album to a lot of people, and they all love it. The rest of the rock pigs in the Rave office, my techno loving housemates and even my parents all dig it. How do you think it managed to cross over so well, because more often than not hip-hop is usually designed to offend?

“I really like some of the more confrontational hip-hop, just to listen to, but you do have to keep the market in mind when you’re writing. But in saying that there is a heap of stuff that I’m into that’s friendly too, so maybe that’s where it’s from. Either way it’s holding people’s attention, and a lot more people dig it than I’d really thought would.”

So how was working with a guru like Geoff Barrow?

“Geoff’s a great guy, and really easy going. He’s got this amazing wealth of knowledge from projects he’s already worked on. With this record he’s worked with me on a couple of arrangements, as well as discussing some of the concepts involved with some of the tracks. One of tracks we worked on actually didn’t make it onto the record. I’ve actually got quite a few tracks lying round that didn’t make it on, that’ll see the light of day soon. In the final stages he helped me with mixing and mastering quite a bit. I’ve been over in his studio in Bristol hanging out a bit, and we’ve done quite a few mixes in the past, including one out here in Australia for Machine Gun Fellatio, which was a year or two ago now. Yeah, I’ve learnt heaps from the man, and he’s so easy going for a man that’s sold so many millions of records. It’s quite inspiring really”